On the Road with Janis Joplin

by John Byrne Cooke

  When I’m confident that Kennedy is headed for a convincing win, I leave the Landmark for the Tiffany Theater on Sunset. The Committee’s barbed skepticism is a bracing reality check for anybody who lets himself get starry-eyed over a politician. Tonight I find the comedy elevating and I stay for both shows.

  In addition to the familiar routines I know well, the Committee is performing in L.A. one I haven’t seen in San Francisco. Here, as in the Committee Theater on Broadway by the Bay, the actors work on a bare stage with a few chairs that get moved around a lot, becoming the seats of a car, chairs in a doctor’s waiting room, or whatever else the actors’ imaginations conjure up. The back and sides of the stage accommodate six or eight doors through which the actors come and go.

  In the piece that’s new to me, the actors take a question from the audience, something serious, like “How do I avoid the draft?” or “How do I make peace with my parents?” and they improvise off it. There are two TV sets atop the framework that supports the doors, one at each side of the stage, facing the audience. For this routine only, the TVs are turned on, set to different channels, the sound off. The idea is that they tap into the cosmic synchronicity of events. If something on one of the TV screens strikes the fancy of the actors, they play off it. Often they ignore the TVs, but from the audience’s point of view sometimes the juxtaposition of what’s happening onstage with the images on TV is hilarious, sometimes it’s bizarre, sometimes uncanny. The piece is a long-form improvisational exercise, one of the Committee’s more existential routines, and they perform it only in the second show.

  The election coverage is over and the networks have returned to late-night programming by the time the sets are turned on. There’s a movie on one station and a talk show on the other. It’s a little after midnight.

  Partway through the piece, one of the networks interrupts the program in progress with a news bulletin. At this time, there are just the three networks and the educational channel and it’s the Big Three that cover breaking news. The bulletin is from the Ambassador Hotel in downtown Los Angeles, where Bobby Kennedy’s election headquarters are located. The network reporter is in a large room with an empty podium on the dais in the background. The reporter’s face is deadly serious and the people in view behind him, moving hither and yon, appear to be on the edge of panic. A crawl at the bottom of the screen says Robert Kennedy has been shot. . . .

  One of the actors turns up the sound on the TV and we begin to piece together the story: McCarthy has conceded. Kennedy concluded his victory speech minutes ago and left the room to go through a kitchen pantry. . . . There are reports of shots fired . . . and Kennedy is wounded. . . . The other TV, the silent one, is still beaming out the regular program. Now the second TV goes blank mid-program and then displays a “Special News Bulletin” logo. . . . On comes a familiar news face.

  For anyone who lived through John Kennedy’s assassination, the report of shots fired at another Kennedy is a bad case of déjà vu.

  The actors tried at first to play off the news report, but the pace of the routine faltered and it has come to a halt. Actors and audience alike stare at the images. After a while, the actors sit down, some onstage, some in the audience. . . . Kennedy has been taken to a hospital. . . . There is no report on his condition yet, but now we see news footage of the hotel pantry, where TV cameramen were present when the shots were fired. The images of Kennedy lying on the floor, people churning around him, some screaming to get back, give him air, are chilling.

  With only fragmentary information, the reporters fill the void as best they can. The TVs replay Kennedy’s victory speech, the rallying cry, “And now, on to Chicago!” and the scene in the pantry. The accused shooter is a strange little man, black-haired, black-eyed, glimpsed only briefly among the much larger forms of Rafer Johnson and Roosevelt Grier, two former football players in the Kennedy entourage who tackle the gunman.

  In the Tiffany Theater, we watch the reports, audience and actors bound together by a real-life drama that renders the Committee’s satires trivial by comparison. People begin to leave the theater by twos and threes, couples and groups first. Those who came by themselves stay longest, because once we go out the door onto the Sunset Strip we will be alone again, with no one to share what we’re feeling.

  The prospect of returning to the Landmark to watch TV, waiting to see if Kennedy will die, is bleak. If Janis and the boys are out, or if they don’t share my reaction to the shooting . . .

  I want to be with someone who shares my perspective on everything that makes this election year so fraught: the civil-rights struggle, the sense that the transition from Eisenhower’s presidency to Jack Kennedy’s really did mark the passing of the torch to a new generation that heeds and represents ours better than the one before, and Vietnam looming above everything else. I want to be with an old friend.

  I wish Mimi Fariña were in the Committee’s L.A. company, and then I remember that Judy Collins is living in L.A., in a rented house on Mulholland Drive.

  I’ve known Judy since the first time she played at the Club 47 in Cambridge. Judy and the Charles River Valley Boys have appeared together at the Newport Folk Festival and on other stages. Her label is Elektra, which connects us further. Judy and I became friends, and, when the stars were right, occasional lovers.

  I phone Judy and she answers. Yes, she says, please come over. Her young son, Clark, has gone to sleep and she would welcome my company for all the same reasons I am feeling.

  Through the night there is nothing on the networks except the Kennedy story. Hospital spokesmen give updates that repeat each other. Kennedy’s condition is critical. No change, nothing to report. When Judy can’t keep her eyes open any longer and retires to her bedroom, I watch the TV in her home office, where there’s a daybed, hoping with every replay of Bobby’s victory speech that it will end another way—this time he won’t go into the hotel pantry, or this time the little guy with the black hair and beady eyes will miss.

  Judy has been keeping company with the writer Michael Thomas, whom I’ve met several times, and that relationship is among the reasons that Judy and I sleep apart on this night. Even so, I wonder later that I, or we, didn’t seek mutual comfort in the closeness of sharing a bed, with or without following the reproductive impulse that rises so urgently in the face of death.

  At some point during the night I turn off the TV and sleep for a few hours. In the morning, Kennedy’s condition is officially unchanged, but the faces of the doctors and the campaign spokesmen who address the news crews at the hospital are grim.

  When Jack Kennedy was killed in Dallas, I didn’t eat for twenty-four hours. I’m experiencing the same suspension of hunger now. At midmorning I go back to the Landmark to check in with the band. They are not as affected by the shooting as they were by the news about Martin Luther King. Kennedy is a politician. King was a crusader working outside the power structure, which gave him in their eyes a moral stature no politician can attain.

  The next morning, we hear the news: In the middle of the night, twenty-five hours after he was shot, Robert Francis Kennedy gave up the ghost.

  —

  MUCH LATER, I learn that my father was in Los Angeles, in the Ambassador Hotel, covering the campaign, and witnessed the calamity in the fateful pantry. I wish I had known, and that I could somehow have gotten in touch with him. His reporter’s experience of momentous events—from the abdication of Edward VIII through the Second World War and the first Kennedy assassination—might have given me some historical perspective, helped me to take a couple of steps back from the moment, to soften the blow. He was in Los Angeles to report on the California primary for the Guardian. His weekly Letter from America for the BBC this week, written the day after Kennedy died and recorded the following day, was one of the most moving that he ever wrote. In it, he fixed an image of the chaos in the hotel pantry that is indelible: “There was a head on the floor streaming blood
, and somebody put a Kennedy boater under it, and the blood trickled down the sides like chocolate sauce on an iced cake. There were splashes of flashbulbs, and infernal heat, and the button eyes of Ethel Kennedy turned to cinders. She was wrestling or slapping a young man and he was saying ‘Listen, lady, I’m hurt, too.’ And then she was on her knees cradling him briefly, and in another little pool of light on the greasy floor was a huddle of clothes and staring out of it the face of Bobby Kennedy, like the stone face of a child’s effigy on a cathedral tomb.”

  Joe Jr. didn’t make it out of his downed plane, Jack didn’t turn his head at the right moment to avoid the fatal shots in Dallas, Bobby took a shortcut through a hotel pantry to bypass the crush of reporters. . . . Isn’t it time one of Joe and Rose Kennedy’s boys got lucky?

  In November 1963, I flew from Boston to Washington to shuffle overnight in a line six people wide and a mile long as it made its way like some sorrowful caterpillar toward the Capitol, where JFK’s closed casket lay in state. As I came out the other side and saw the first streaks of dawn in the gray-red sky, the man beside me shook my hand and said, “I’m proud to have walked with you.”

  I find now that I’m more affected by losing Bobby. Janis and the boys make no objection when I announce that I’m going to New York for a couple of days.

  I take a red-eye flight, arrive at dawn, take a taxi to Manhattan and stand in a line of thoughtful and silent people to go through St. Patrick’s Cathedral on Fifth Avenue, where the closed casket of the junior senator from New York rests on display.

  I recognize Theodore Sorensen alone on the steps of the church, unnoticed by the passersby. Sorensen ghost-wrote JFK’s book Profiles in Courage, and he wrote speeches for Jack as president. He counseled Bobby against challenging Gene McCarthy in the primaries, but when Bobby announced his candidacy, Sorensen left a lucrative law practice to join the campaign.

  The next day, my mother and I watch on television in her apartment on 72nd Street as the train carries Bobby’s casket to Washington past the mourners who line the tracks all along the two-hundred-mile route. It’s an extraordinary sight—police and military men standing to attention and saluting as the train passes, ordinary citizens silent beside the tracks. Some remove their hats as the train passes. Many are weeping. As in the aftermath of Jack Kennedy’s death, and Martin Luther King’s, I find that the visible grief of others evokes the strongest emotions in me.

  When Bobby is in the ground at Arlington beside Jack, I fly back to L.A. On the evening of my return I go to the Troubadour to hear Joni Mitchell and seek some kindred souls. I find Chip Monck sitting with a tableful of friends. When Joni sings “Both Sides Now,” the beauty of her voice and the song penetrate the last of my reserves and I lose it completely, weeping freely, with Chip’s arm around my shoulders, until the song is over.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  Cheap Thrills

  THE ALBUM IS lurching toward completion. Finishing each song is a struggle for the band. In the final days, Janis and Sam and the Columbia engineer spend a marathon thirty-six hours in the studio working on what they hope will be the final mix. A day and a half with no sleep and not much to eat. When they step out onto Sunset Boulevard at last, they feel like time travelers.

  John Simon revises the mix in ways that strike the band as bizarre when they hear his proposed version of the album. One song ends abruptly in the middle of a chord, as if it had been cut off by accident. The band pushes for changes. In the contract with Columbia, Albert has secured for Big Brother the right of approval on the album, so their requests are more than just requests. John Simon quits the project. He will insist that his name not appear on the album and, much later, he will regret this decision.

  Big Brother works on the mix with co-producer Elliot Mazer, but our time in L.A. is up. We have gigs to play, starting with a long weekend for Bill Graham at the Fillmore and Winterland in San Francisco.

  “John Simon and I talked in the last few years. I had several conversations with him on the phone, and he said some interesting things. He kind of apologized. It was a kind of an apology, in effect, that he really felt he had an attitude. He was specifically sorry, he said, that he hadn’t put his name on the Cheap Thrills album. . . . And he said, ‘You know, I really had an attitude about you guys, and I really regret that now. And I listen to Cheap Thrills now and I think it was better than I thought it was at the time.’”

  David Getz

  In the five weeks that remain before we return to the East, we’re booked to play ten days in San Francisco and a smattering of gigs around the Bay. At the end of June we’ll play in Denver for the Family Dog, our only trip outside California during two and a half months of touring the Golden State.

  JUNE 13–16, 1968: Fillmore and Winterland, S.F.

  JUNE 22–23: Carousel Ballroom

  JUNE 24: Burlingame Country Club

  JUNE 28–29: Family Dog, Denver

  JULY 5: Concord, Calif.

  JULY 6: Santa Rosa Fairgrounds

  JULY 7: Golden Gate Park, free concert

  JULY 12–13: Kaleidoscope, L.A.

  JULY 16–18: “Carousel at Fillmore,” Fillmore West

  The mood in San Francisco this summer is a far cry from the flower child optimism of a year ago. Music, love, and flowers it ain’t. Within the counterculture, even those who have little political awareness are affected by the lingering bummer of the two assassinations. Before Martin Luther King was killed, many blacks, especially the young, were turning away from his philosophy of nonviolence to support the more confrontational tactics advocated by young militants like Huey Newton, Bobby Seale, and Stokely Carmichael. With King gone, the traditional civil-rights establishment is in disarray. Black power and the Black Panthers are attracting more supporters.

  I follow the dramatically redrawn presidential race on the evening news before I venture out on the town or across the Bay to Berserkeley. Most of Bobby Kennedy’s supporters are turning to Gene McCarthy, but the energy—the belief—isn’t there. Gene no longer looks like the man to steal the Democratic nomination from Lyndon Johnson’s designated successor, Vice President Hubert Humphrey. McCarthy doesn’t seem to have the heart for an all-out fight, and RFK’s victories in four out of the five primaries where he challenged McCarthy have revealed the limits of McCarthy’s support.

  And Humphrey! Humphrey was a tub-thumping liberal in his Senate days, when he was dubbed “the Happy Warrior.” He gave a courageous speech on civil rights at the 1948 Democratic convention, but in Lyndon Johnson’s service Humphrey has become a waffling toady on Vietnam. Even now that LBJ is a lame duck, Hubert won’t speak out against Johnson’s policies.

  On the Republican side, Richard Nixon, of all people, is cleaning up in the primaries. “You won’t have Nixon to kick around anymore,” he told the press corps after his failed bid to become governor of California, back in ’62. Son of a bitch won’t keep a promise.

  The prospects are depressing. I watch the news less and visit friends in Berkeley more often. I focus on my job. Our next eastern tour is coming up. There are travel arrangements to be made, gigs to confirm with Janis and the band. Janis doesn’t want to sing more than three nights in a row, four at most. It’s hard on her voice. She has pleaded with Albert to balance the performance dates with days of rest. Others in the office, those handling the day-to-day business, have a habit of calling to say, “When you’re in Buffalo, we can add a gig in Syracuse and another in Albany,” and suddenly there are five nights in a row on the itinerary. It has become part of my job to help protect Janis’s vocal cords.

  Big Brother’s long weekend for Bill Graham in mid-June coincides, on the Sunday, with an event the Committee bills as the Second Thelonious Monk Memorial Satirathon, a comedy festival in which the company, including members emeritus and unofficial, recalled from afar, will perform starting at 9:00 P.M., when the summer dusk still glows over the Golden
Gate, and continue through the night to daylight at the other end. Paul Rothchild gets wind of the event and persuades Jac Holzman to let him record the audio for a possible LP. Paul recruits Bob Neuwirth to be his—what else—hipness advisor, and enlists me to shoot photos for the album jacket and insert. I’ve been taking photographs since my father gave me a Kodak Brownie while I was still in grade school, more seriously since I learned to develop and print my own film at the Putney School. My first thematic project was shooting the modern dance class in rehearsals and performance. Girls in leotards were the initial motivation. In Cambridge and at the Newport Folk Festivals I have shot folk musicians young and old. On the road with Big Brother, I’ve been taking pictures of Janis and the boys.

  Big Brother’s weekend is something of a marathon itself: Thursday at the Fillmore, Friday and Saturday at Winterland, and back at the Fillmore on Sunday for a benefit for the Matrix, the San Francisco club where Jefferson Airplane got their start and where Big Brother played often, when the developing San Francisco scene was still a local secret. I’m on the job until after Big Brother’s Sunday set at the Fillmore, and I spend the rest of the night at the Committee. I shoot enough pictures to get at least one good image of each member of the regular company and most of the guest performers. In the end, Elektra elects not to put out an album, but the Satirathon remains in memory as the kind of onetime San Francisco event that made the late sixties an ongoing celebration of the arts.

  When Big Brother receives the final mix of the album from Elliot Mazer, we find that he has spliced to the head of band 1, side A, live sound recorded in March at Winterland, full of kids, the band tuning up, and Bill Graham’s voice introducing Big Brother: “Four gentlemen and one great, great broad, Big Brother and the Holding Company.” With that, Janis hits the scratcher to kick off “Combination of the Two.” It’s an effective beginning. Elsewhere, Mazer has mixed in live sound from several sources including Barney’s Beanery, a Santa Monica Boulevard restaurant-bar-and-pool-hall where Warner Brothers mogul Jack Warner used to eat in anonymity with his mistress during Hollywood’s glamour days. In the glamour days of rock, Barney’s is Janis’s favorite L.A. hangout.